Some time ago, I began blogging on our Sunday sermons to help myself review; today, I’m continuing that by covering our July 26 sermon, on Hebrews 9:11-14. Life intervened, so I missed posting on several of our sermons from Hebrews, but now I’m trying to get back to it. As you’ll see if you look at the video, we’re now doing church outdoors and socially distanced due to COVID-19, but we continue to meet.

As usual, I won’t summarize the sermon, since you can stream it if you want to hear yourself, but will focus on what I take away from it.

P. Peter’s first key point was that Jesus is the better high priest, the better sacrifice in the perfect tabernacle. Part of what he highlighted was that in religions all over the world, people have the idea that if they just appease God, they will get what they want. Even in our post-Christian era, the same thing carries over to other areas of life; we think if we just make the right laws or right reforms or we do the right things in our life then we’ll get what we want. This ends up being man-centric, self-centric; we make it about having our desires fulfilled. But Jesus is greater, better than all that. This was a terrific reminder to me, because even though I know the gospel, I can still at times focus too much on what I want out of life. But the key question is this: Is Jesus greater? Better than anything I can possibly have or get in this life? I believe he is, but may God help me to always live that out.

We also were reminded how Christ delivers us from dead works. From that point, what stood out most to me was the reminder that true repentance is recognizing that we are unable to earn anything and surrendering to God. We need to learn to find rest in the atonement of Christ. I definitely needed this reminder of the blessing of true repentance, of coming to God without any pretense of accomplishment. And this couples to his final point, that Jesus frees us to serve the living God, to worship him. It’s through true repentance that we find the delight of being able to serve God, of delighting in his beauty and finding great joy in God, because there we find life. Again, this is what I need – not accomplishing enough, checking enough off my to-do list, or feeling like I’ve served him well, but finding joy in God because of what he has already done FOR me in Christ and because he allows me to be his child.